This blog and I.This is my artist diary since mid 2005.Browse this right panel for carnivorous links and info. See artist statement and bio below, and read this blog as a reversed painter diary.I live in Barcelona and work between Barcelona and Bratislava. I am member of Miroir Noir Group with Milos Kopták.

The corruptions and violence in Rai Escalé’s dark paintings may be personal, but also come from the collective subconscious shared by each human being. His horrific art alternates between shocking and disturbing, but remains deeply insightful and may stimulate the journey of self-discovery of the viewer. The hidden meanings behind Escalé’s images aren't necessarily learned, but may stem from the unconscious. Making statements on the freakishness of consumerism and beauty culture, Rai Escalé has managed to pursue the nature of phantasmagorical human alternations, and evoke some of the discomfort one has when facing others. You could say, his obtrusive work has undone and decoded the ferocity of Bacon.

Miroir Noir is a four-handed, pictorial collaboration between Milos Koptak (Zilina, Slovakia, 1969) and Rai Escalé (Barcelona, Spain, 1964). This project started in late 2006 as an attempt to update – and pulverize - the darkest of Spanish and Slovakian traditions together with their icons: Goya, Velázquez, Saura, the Golem, Kafka, Báthory, Vachal, Franco, Stalin… These wild painting sessions are held in Bratislava or in Barcelona during intense paint-trances in which both artists paint at the same time as well as on each other’s works until an exceptional and dark blend of paintings is revealed; full of rage and poetry, but also filled with twisted irony and a strong sense of humor.

. . . . .I live and work in Barcelona.I am painter and paint people.Due to his biological implications human face give the greatest and deepest source of emotions and information to spectator, and being a very simple icon, when representing it lets the artist plenty of space to play with emotions and feelings. I've always been doing portraitsIn the early years I used to over paint my own paints, but soon that came to be a problem, and had to start looking for 'painted' layers to keep painting. So I started making my own through collage or just painting over photos or printed material glued on a canvas.Since then I permanently seek and find images laying hidden under other images. Random images among the millions that we come across every day.And that (when successfully done), gives all my works this strange sensation of layered reality, with bits of dada, surrealistic or pop sensations inlaid or as constructing parts of each portrait.Transparencies, shaded layers, casual remains of what was behind come to be essential part of the construction of the final portrait, showing behind the paintwork.And i do it through rough paint, ink, nearly no scissors and any computers... But even if not gluing anything, technically they still call it collage...So PAINT-COLLAGE IMAGES is what I do. ENJOY AND TAKE YOUR TIME.

Bio de Alex Under

The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.

Bansky

There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it.

Henry Moore

If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already.. the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.

Cindy Sherman

You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.
The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love.

Francis Bacon, my dad

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.

Pablo Picasso

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things..."

Edgar Degas

I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black...."

Auguste Renoir

Art is not a mirror to reflect the world in, but a hammer with which to shape it.

Vladimir Mayakovsky

The price of collaboration in art is as in the concentration camps excremental suffocation. It is not by submission, coolness, apathy,
boredom that great art is created, no matter what the cynics tell us.
The secret ingredient is what is most difficult to learn: courage.

Boris Lurie

And yet, word is not the life. People talk just to attack something or to defend themselves.
But the one who refuses talking...
How secretful a picture is... A gleam...
that cannot be explained.

'The Overpainted Writing', by Bela Bacso

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

Katy Phipps, visionaire

An artist does not render nature, he renders visible. He sees what others do not see, and by seeing and rendering on canvas, paper, whatever makes his vision visible to others (if they are able to see).

André Breton

He does not know in advance what he is going to put on the canvas, nor does he decide what colors to use. He does not will to do anything, he does not seek to do anything. He allows his sensibilities a free rein, paints in a trance--a trance which has all the acuteness, the visual definiteness of dreams. His only care is to be faithful to what is given, to what is found, to paint what he sees.

Arthur Rimbaud

Why, after the great artists, do people ever try to do anything again? Only because, from generation to generation, through what great artists have done, the instincts change. And, as the instincts change, so there comes a renewal of the feeling of how can I remake this thing once again more clearly, more exactly, more violently. You see, I relieve that art is recording.